Early 2000s were peak of humanity | Hacker News Reader

Early 2000s were peak of humanity

lukaszkups.net

43 pointslukaszkups74 comments

I don’t know the author’s age but suspect this is an entry in the “<my teenage years/early twenties> were the peak of humanity” genre.

Perhaps so, but it was a really nice time.

The Iron Curtain had fallen; there was hope for Russia to become a democracy, and the weight of living in fear of dying in a nuclear war was lifted. China was becoming, perhaps not democratic, but at least economically liberal.

The economy was doing reasonably well for most people - it wasn't the high inflation of the eighties, and 2008 was not yet on the horizon. It wasn't yet the two-level economy that it became - if you were lower class, there was still a plausible route to the middle class.

AIDS was becoming manageable rather than a death sentence. Climate change wasn't really on people's radar as a real worry yet - there wasn't a sense of doom about it.

There was still hope that technology would free and empower us rather than enslave us.

And no, I wasn't a teenager or in my early twenties. Though I did have a pretty sweet life then...

> The Iron Curtain had fallen; there was hope for Russia to become a democracy, and the weight of living in fear of dying in a nuclear war was lifted.

seems like you are confusing early 00s with early 90s

For the international stuff, that's possible. Still... Russia wasn't an adversary yet, even in the early 00s. Neither was China. Nobody was building bomb shelters and doomsday retreat bunkers.

People were definitely building bomb shelters and doomsday retreat bunkers in the aughts, although they were signifiers of adherence to a particular political outlook.

There was definitely a sense that US hegemony would not be contested by a rival great power, but there was also widespread belief that that hegemony would be undermined and chipped away at by a million insurgent groups and terror cells. IIRC a rivalry with China was speculative and sometimes dismissed as fanciful within the foreseeable future, but we had literal terrorism response drills at my high school. We currently live in the craziest possible international arena, but it's not like the Bush years were some utopia by comparison.

the bunkers were due to "gub'mnt gonn get us" in the wake of ruby ridge and waco

weirdos and nutjobs running their cults. not hyper-rich, deepy engaged technical types.

The OP doesn't claim the it was the peak of humanity, the claim is much tighter than that: it was the perfect balance of technology usage.

Almost universally, any time closer to today is better for most people in most ways than a previous time. But there are exceptions -- prehistoric hunter/gatherer lifestyle is superior in several ways to the modern one, but the risk of dying early in a horrible way is high enough that it's not true overall.

Should we live more like cavemen in very constrained specific ways? Probably. Do we want to force 8 billion people to starve to death by returning to that life? Heck no.

Similar, there are likely small parts of the 2000's that are better than today. That doesn't mean the 2000's are the peak of humanity.

"Almost universally, any time closer to today is better for most people in most ways than a previous time"

Wind that back 20 years. Yeah we got cheaper computing. Luxury items got cheaper, necessities got more expensive. I can make do with a 2010 think pad, but my rent is cooked and I'll never own a house. I'd rather be born in the 70s than the 90s.

20 years ago the average house cost 7-8.5 times the average income (cf 5X today). 2006 was the worst time to buy a house in America, ever. It was an exceptionally bad time because prices collapsed in 2008 and anybody buying in 2006 would have been seriously underwater.

Well I live in Australia. The situation is quite different.

You know what else you had in 2006? Loans, without jumping through hoops. "Being underwater" is the kind of thing people say when they look at their home as a thing they intend to make money reselling later. If you want to own the place you live, then you want easily-acquired loans and available inventory. It doesn't matter what someone else thinks it's worth, as long as you can pay your note.

You seem to have rose glasses for the actual situation. Many of those people with easily acquired loans have lost everything since the terms of the loans were as easily changed in 2009 and they could no longer afford the payments

Those loans are the only reason many elder millenials managed to own property at all. Not all of the loans given in that era were ARMs or otherwise amenable to modification; many were regular old fixed-rate mortgages.

In the US, adjustable rate is extremely rare in general. I had never even heard of them until my 30s in threads like these.

> The OP doesn't claim the it was the peak of humanity, the claim is much tighter than that: it was the perfect balance of technology usage.

From the literal title of the article:

> Early 2000s were peak of humanity

First sentence there-after:

> I genuinely believe that the early 2000s were probably the closest humanity ever got to the perfect balance between technology and actual life.

Titles are almost always over-simplified clickbait and frequently contradict the article.

Looking at his linkedin he went to college in 2008 so must have been about 13 at the "sweet spot was somewhere around 2003".

What is truly unfortunate is that even if there was an objective way of looking at history, people would just dismiss it as "oh, shut up, it's just nostalgia." Being unable to be objective doesn't invalidate the argument.

So what if the early 2000s were, in fact, the peak of humanity? It doesn't seem so absurd when teenage people today rediscover 90s/2000s fashion and are nostalgic for an era they have never lived in. When I was a teenager in the 2000s I didn't give a rat's arse about the 80s, they felt old and stale and with terrible hairdos. Yet today young people yearn for the 00s aesthetic [1] than whatever sanitised corporate hell we live in today.

Maybe people aren't nostalgic for their teenage years in particular, but for a world that wasn't ruled by the Internet and computers. When the Internet wasn't an infinite plane of corporate capitalism ruling the world, coercing people to jack in the hamster wheel every minute of their lives through their smartphones.

1: provided you are in the same algorithmic bubble of mine full of late teens/early adult people finding joy in analog experiences away from technology.

I, too, often think of the early 2000s as the peak of humanity. But I find it's important to recognize when your judgment is being clouded by nostalgia, especially the extremely well-known and extensively documented bias to see how things were when you were in your early adult years as the way things ought to be in perpetuity.

There were a lot of things that sucked about tech in that era! It was literally when pets.com ads blanketed the airwaves. (edited to add: And more specifically, I think the exact time the OP is describing was already too far down its current path of ubiquitous social media (remember Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, AO3, etc.?) and omnipresent commercial surveillance. The fork point to avoid those fates was probably a decade earlier.)

But I think we can all agree that it is absolutely when music peaked, and pop culture has just gone downhill since then. :)

Wait, are you saying the pets.com era was worse than the current era where websites even more dubious (gambling, prediction markets) are still openly advertised?

You’re saying that the era that sets us down the path of social media is worse than the one today where they rule the world?

Sure, the 2000s weren’t an idyllic time, but the point is that they were much better than today, and likely than earlier due to the technological advances not yet turning out for the worst.

No, I didn’t say anything of the sort.

You wouldn't have looked to the 80s, you would have looked to the 70s (maybe punk). The 90s are now 30 years ago, and in the 90s, young people did have false nostalgia for the 60s. "I wish it was the '60s, I wish I could be happy / I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen"

Most of my friends spent the back half of the 90s railing against corporate culture, bland mass media and bemoaning the shift from early 90s counter-culture to late-90s glossy consumerism. It was a quick skip from Columbine to 9/11 and then into the Iraq war. Absolutely nothing about that time felt like a golden age.

Doubt that Gen Z or α will have that opinion

I've known about people born in late 2007 and 2008 "missing" the Windows Aero & Mac Aqua aesthetic and even going to the point of saying that everything was cook back then when they were really young or weren't born yet. Kinda odd but I'd like to know if some other people thought that way about the age they were born

Every generation has their “good ole days.” Unfortunately the old days never were that good for people who were around at the time.

You say that but people of a few different generations in my family all agree the late 90s / early 00s were amazing.

Some romanticise how things were in their childhood, but most would say that the late 90s / early 00s were objective a great time to be alive.

It was a great time for a certain group of people, but if you happened to be black, or gay, or trans, or Muslim, or had a pre-existing medical condition, it was not so rosy.

I was in my late teens / early 20s at the time, and not in any of those groups, but I did not find the late 90s/early 2000s to be particularly "amazing" or objectively great. I wanted to make movies, but film was incredibly expensive, and digital video wasn't yet good enough. I wanted to make ambitious software, but absolutely everything was harder and lower-level back then.

It was harder and more expensive to get something delivered, and before you say that was better and we're all spoiled by Amazon, the net result was that you had to drive all over the city to pick stuff up.

We knew high-speed internet would change things, but it wasn't there yet. The internet kind of sucked (sorry). I remember spending hours on Excite and AltaVista searching for obscure information that now wouldn't be considered obscure in the slightest, and when I finally found something, it was rarely helpful. Don't get me wrong, I have nostalgia for the early internet, but at the time, we all knew it would get better. I wanted every video to look as good as Apple's movie trailer site, and it took about 10 years for that to happen.

There were plenty of good things about that time, but this "good ole days" thinking is dangerous. It's the antithesis of gratitude. It gets in the way of having vision and imagining a better future.

One last thing: all the stuff we "lost" is still here. You can still hand-write a letter. I still play CDs and take photos on 35mm film. People wax poetic about the time before phones, by typing these nostalgic thoughts into their phone. If you hate Instagram, get off Instagram.

That isn't a universal statement. I personally loved the late 90s. Everything was legitimately great.

The author hints at _the end of ownership_ when talking about physical media but I think that's been a significant regression worth emphasizing.

There have been countless stories about people losing access to their favorite movie when streaming service's licensing agreement expires, Amazon removing books from their Kindle library for ... reasons, Sony moving to digital-only PlayStation releases, etc. These examples are annoying and mostly hinder access to content but there's also the legacy element (what do my children inherit? My Steam account? Some sampler app I used to make music instead of analog hardware?), the inability to share books or music with friends and family, the surveillance aspects, etc.

This class of issues has also started to bleed over into The Real World, as companies no longer sell you dumb appliances but a license (which they can terminate) to use, for example, a computer on wheels _in the ways that they see fit_.

> Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about.

I think I agree with the premise of this. I miss when there were limits on our time with the web each day. I miss not being expected to be up to speed. I really miss magazines. Etc. Windows XP/Panther felt capable enough.

If we could go back I think turn by turn navigation would be the hardest thing to give up.

I actively avoid using navigation. If I’ve already been there once I’ll just try get there without it.

Sometimes I check the route on Google maps first to get an idea, then close it.

I think navigation is like a muscle and you’ve got to train it.

Though I do like rerouting depending on traffic conditions. I guess in some cities that would basically feel mandatory to use

> Though I do like rerouting depending on traffic conditions

This is the biggest reason why I'll use navigation even when I know almost a dozen different ways to go somewhere. Using navigation services, its easier to tell if its worth it today to take the toll roads someplace, or if I should really avoid that bridge today, or what not. Choosing the route blindly can sometimes make a difference of a half hour or $10+ of unnecessary tolls depending on the journeys I take.

Wait until you find out the navigation app lies to you based on where it thinks you "should" be driving.

I can consistently shave 4-5(!!) minutes by taking a right at a light and coming into a further light from a different direction rather than going straight and sitting in gridlock for 4/5ths of a mile that would've taken ~10min. No illegal turn or difficult left or anything.

Basically if I can see the traffic up ahead I ignore my GPS and take the right, instant ETA drop.

I have other local examples but that's the most egregious.

From my understanding its often because those side roads have different "weights", based on expected traffic load on the street designs and what not. Its wanting to push you on to the main streets, often because when it gets too loose about routing people through all the side streets residents complain about the quiet side streets becoming busier than intended and things can become less safe. People don't like their normally quiet residential side streets becoming the new main street because Google decided it might save some people 2 minutes so it routed half the city through there. It definitely varies a good bit from place to place though.

I'm mostly talking about comparing different routes on like 70+mi highway paths through cities around DFW, where each of these highways would have pretty much identical weights its just a question of which of the potentially hundreds of possible routes to take. There's tons of highways crisscrossing each other, for a lot of paths its not just a "hop on the interstate". Which interstate? What path do I carve to cut over? When do I decide to start going South, on US-75 or I-35E or Dallas North Tollway or President George Bush Turnpike or 820 or I-35W? Which highway do I take to go West, PGBT or I-30 or I-20 or 820 or 121 or 114 or 183? Then factor in some of these are toll roads completely, some have optional tolled express lanes, some have HOV lanes, some are toll roads for some stretches but not others.

Having the navigation systems say "You can go this route, and it'll take an 1:20 but be free, or you can take this route and it'll take you an hour but cost you $5, or you can take this route and it'll take you 55 minutes but cost you $14" is pretty nice. Because sometimes that freeway path can also be 55 minutes, or maybe sometimes that $5 tollway path has an accident and will actually take you 1:30. Or maybe you do want to take that tollway for a bit but be sure to get off at that highway otherwise you'll get stuck in that traffic, or the inverse of that. And when you're talking about an hour long route, the traffic situation may change significantly while in route.

I think the peak internet experience was blogging. When social networks and social media came along, the decline started happening fast, and I began to see it that way. I was genuinely excited when the iPhone 2G came out, but then that excitement faded, and I quit all social stuff. I still feel nostalgic for the early days of the internet, when people and communities were truly connected.

I can't stand.

When people type like this.

New line after every dot.

Even when not necessary.

Ultra short sentences.

I guess it's "cool"?

How does airing your ego hangups contribute to the discussion of the topic?

I used to do this a long time ago just because that's how my brain would process how I'm talking on AIM/ICQ. Though I wouldn't add the period at the end of each new line, that is weird.

This was how I learnt to write, as it's how I think.

I latter learnt in school that writing is only deemed correct when it's stylised into elaborate sentences structures that no human would use when thinking in their own heads.

If you're just trying to convey a thought I don't know why people care?

Could you not understand the point OP was making or something? In what way is this a less valid way of writing (aside from the fact it's not what's taught as correct in school?)

People complain like that in an attempt to [subconsciously?] steer others toward conformity.

I can't speak for others, but my own internal monologue is certainly not one-line LinkedIn-speak.

Is this satire? Please, lord Jesus, let this be satire.

I'm autistic. When I think in words, I typically think in bullet point sentences.

That said, I was so bad at English as kid that I've had to spend a lot of time learning how to write well. So I can do it if I care enough to invest the effort.

This not to say I see no value in creative writing. You can often summarise the core elements of fictional story in a couple of dozen bullet points, but the story of story isn't why we enjoy to read stories.

In my ideal world, when I'd like to make a point, I would use bullet points. But we don't live in that world so aside from my own personal notes, I rarely ever communicate in bullet points.

you know in your heart it's not

It's how everyone with a smartphone learns how to write these days. Editing large blocks of text on a smartphone is still extremely annoying, so people get used to hitting send between every few words.

Yimspeak.

I think it started on LinkedIn, where posts got more reach depending on how many users clicked the 'See More' expander link, so users who wanted to be 'Thought Leaders' were incentivised to present their banal ideas using as many newlines as possible.

\n;dr

I kinda feel like many might be biased to view the era of their own youth as the peak of humanity.

Ah, yes. 9/11. The "war on terror". "Peak of humanity", indeed.

None of the sequelae of that have really improved since then, at least as far as the first world is concerned. The foundations of universal surveillance were being laid down, but it wasn’t yet feasible. Police (transport security, border patrol, potato, pot-ah-to) ruffling through your belongings had not yet been normalized. You could transact with cash. People largely still sort of believed that talking to your political opponents would lead to better outcomes than making them comply under threat of government violence or unemployment.

(Plenty of things sucked, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that a lot of the fallout from the “war on terror” was still in the upper atmosphere.)

And people were yapping away on their phones while driving and crashing into trees.

I remember it too. It wasn't that rosy.

Explain how there was "kind of" instant messengers. AIM had already been out for years at that point

By year 2000, there were "proprietary" messengers aplenty - yahoo, aim, icq, qq, and a bunch more. All of which were simple enough to reverse engineer, so Linux user could just install Gaim (later renamed Pidgin) and connect to most any of those.

What's more, there were already two open standards: SIP/SIMPLE, and newer XMPP.

I assure you stuff like OSCAR (the protocol for AIM and ICQ) is anything but simple and was a huge effort by many people to reverse engineer.

Tech is the way it is because Big Tech wants it to be. Social media is engineered to be the most profitable for the big corporations who run the attention economy which incidentally is a surveillance and content exploitation economy hosting too many narcissists yammering for attention. The software world is several stages of enshittification deep, and yet we're awash in incredible hardware that would be mind-blowing if we weren't so constantly distracted with how much noise and bother the software makes.

> we're awash in incredible hardware that would be mind-blowing if we weren't so constantly distracted with how much noise and bother the software makes.

This is the part of it that bums me out the most. I just wish aesthetics didn't drive so much of the current tech world. Everything has an absolutely beautiful interface now that is slow, buggy, can't be shared, etc. But I guess at least it's pretty and pays the bills.

Agreed. Have a look at the music app that Jordan Rudess built for the iPad that allows a kind of tapped steel guitar / keyboard interface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JA4DqWmHBY&t=165s

He made the touch screen interface into a low latency, multi-touch musical instrument. I couldn't seem to find if he had made this program open source or otherwise available, but it looks pretty cool.

I am amazed at the displays, CPUs, memory, networks, storage, and not to mention GPUs of 2026. They are really incredible. Then I derp around on my tablet with these clunky ad-laden websites with extremely poor layout, janky scrolling, barely registering my fat finger flailings, alternating between hitting a one pixel button amongst a sea of mis-aligned text and a grid of six big stupid square things, two of which are ads, and all of which are algorithm-computed content that isn't really what I wanted to see...

Big Tech is nefarious, but not the only force to blame. I think that modern internet use would be inferior to the early millennium regardless, just because people's main interface these days is the smartphone with its small screen and keyboard, and that tends to discourage long-form text and nuance. If you look at libre corners of the internet, they have seen that decline nearly as much as corporate platforms.

Another thing not mentioned is that not everyone had a camera 24/7. You could act silly without fear that one minor fuckup would haunt you the rest of your life.

In my opinion, it was early 90s. In my parent's opinion, it was early 60s. I wonder what my grandparents thought...

Depends on how you define humanity

Isn't this the central conceit behind "The Matrix"? lol

The Matrix is more the 90s with the peak as 1999.

>Morpheus: You believe it’s the year 1999 when in fact it’s closer to 2199. I can’t tell you exactly what year it is because we honestly don’t know. There’s nothing I can say that will explain it for you, Neo.

As if it's mandated now to have social networks on your smartphone. I uninstalled anything owned by Zuckerberg or fucking Spez, I use only Signal for chat and Openstreetmap with offline vector maps for navigation. I have no tiktok or forever-scrolling apps.

Indeed go ask anybody in China, India, North-Africa, or Eastern Europe. I am sure they will tell you things were better back then. Oh wait. Seems like the author never read Hans Rosling's Factfulness. Big recommendation for anyone out there who hasn't yet. If you have find yourself having a bleak outlook, this book is an antidote: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34890015-factfulness

Despite the article title, it's clearly about technology usage patterns roughly 25 years ago being a lot better than they are today. Its obviously from the PoV of someone in a developed western country, probably America. Every single time someone brings up positive things about the past there's always some 'Nuh uh, look at how bad this thing you weren't a part of was at that time.'. Boring, pedantic, and not even relevant to what the article is about.

Early 2000s in my corner of Eastern Europe (Romania) was a very optimistic time. Higher salaries for locally employed educated people were on the horizon, while there was also the ability to work seasonally abroad and make a good sum that could be invested back home. Infrastructure started to see improvement through EU funds. And, to relate this to the linked post, lots of citydwellers then got broadband and found the internet transformational and positive for their lives.

In fact, it was a far more optimistic time than since about 2020, as soaring cost of food and going out means even privileged middle-class people are complaining, and infrastructure improvements have stagnated.

Agree 100%

One of the best books I’ve ever read, extremely enlightening.

> Indeed go ask anybody in China, India, North-Africa, or Eastern Europe.

I've had pretty good time in "Eastern" (Central) Europe, so did my wife in China.

People were still optimistic about EU/euro, that lasted roughly until Lisbon treaty when they forced Ireland to repeat the referendum until they got result they wanted, which later become EU's MO and since then it went all downhill, with another major successes as Wir schaffen das 2015, Green deal 2020 or Totalitarian COVID pass 2021. Hard to understand someone who can still support this failed project. I would just dissolve it and return back to EEA.

Next time maybe ask actually people from those countries instead of parroting some writer.

I find this way of thinking to be almost alien. There's nothing here that I would want to go back to.

You could not give me enough money that I would trade down to a 2000-era cell phone from my current phone. "Technology was a tool, not a lifestyle" -- well, guess what! It's still just a tool, not a lifestyle. I'm shitposting here instead of on slashdot, big whoop. My lifestyle is completely unrelated to this.

The "physical world"? What if I want to listen to a song that I heard on the radio the other day, or that I heard playing in a store or something, or that someone told me about? I can't just "pop a CD in the player", there's a whole thing where I have to literally purchase the music from a store that sells music. How is that possibly better than the world where I can just pull up the album and play it? Pop in a DVD? Are you insane?

"There was a very obvious boundary between being online and being offline. Today that boundary basically doesn't exist. You wake up online. You work online. You eat while watching something online. You walk while listening to something online. You go to bed while scrolling online."

So ... maybe the "work online" thing applies. But none of the others do. Maybe the listening while walking too; but I had a crazy thing called a "walkman" (I'm old) and "ipod" (but not that old) back in the day too. I guess circa 2000 I might have had an mp3 player. But the others I opt out of because I don't want to. It's easy ... just don't do that?

"Social media" -- I absolutely hate this term because it combines two unrelated things; friend networks and user-generated content. Most of my friend networks have abandoned online social media almost entirely, and I in turn will almost never use it. User-generated content is fun but I'm a lurker and a consumer, I have no hopes or dreams of becoming an "influencer" or "going viral" or whatever. I understand that for some people that is a dream, like being a rock star or a movie star was when I was younger, but I simply opt out of this and it doesn't affect my life.

I could go on and on. I simply don't understand how the author finds themselves in this bind where they are "forced" to use technology they don't want to use. Just ... don't use it.

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